“Good for:
People who enjoy some sweet American-ish manga art.
Bad for:
People looking for a tight, scripted story.
Great for:
People who remember reading this as it was serialized in Nintendo Power.
The art is great, and the story is a little scattered. No doubt due in part to the fact that it was published only a handful of pages at a time. Story breaks that would seem natural with a month in between feel bizarre when collected, and the whole thing is rushed.
This was one of a few different, very cool comics that were published in Nintendo Power during the 90’s.
My personal favorite, the Super Mario Adventures illustrated by Charlie Nozawa. The expressions are priceless, and not like anything I’ve seen before. Nozawa did a great job making something cartoony and fun, but just look at the details and perspectives he used (especially on that padlock):
Now, uh…I would never advocate stealings. And it brings up an interesting issue in the gaming world, which is preservation v. collecting.
See, the Super Mario Adventures comics are available in a collected edition on Amazon. For $350. And it’s not because it’s that good a book. Because really, very few books are $350-good, and even the ones that are, you don’t really know until you look at it retrospectively. I’d pay $350 for all the best books I’ve read. But I never would have picked them up in the first place if that was the price of admission.
$350 is a collector price. The price that someone is willing to pay in order to have something that other people don’t have. That price is not, as I like it, the preservation price.
When I talk preservation in this case, I’m talking about having an accessible version of these comics so that they are readable by a large audience as opposed to preserving the original prints in Nintendo Power. I’m talking about cultural preservation that keeps these cool things in the front of peoples’ minds , not sealing something behind a temperature-controlled laser grid or whatever. Is that what museums do with most of the day? Set up laser grids? Because it seems like movie museums have a lot of laser grids, all of which fail in spectacular fashion. See, what these laser grid people never count on is a female burglar in a skintight outfit who is doing backflips instead of walking normal style. They have their one rotund male security guard put on a pair of track pants and try to walk through, and they wonder why they keep losing priceless diamonds.
It’s a shame that not everything is reprinted and sometimes is easier to just read for free on the internets. http://www.yoshiart.com/comics.php
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